A stoush between composers – you’d like to see that? Well, the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville has arranged it for you at this year’s event, which takes over the North Queensland capital from July 25 through to August 2.
It just goes to prove that showdowns don’t just happen at Queensland Country Bank Stadium, home of the North Queensland Cowboys.
But when it comes to the composers, we’re not talking tackles or a cage fight, more’s the pity. We’re looking at how it wasn’t all sweetness and light between certain luminaries of the classical music world.
It’s the sort of quirky fare artistic director Jack Liebeck tends to program to mix things up a bit. For example, his previous Guilty Pleasures program (which is also back again this year) let artists cut loose and cross genres to play outside the square. Rock music and other genres were played by classical musicians who appreciated the freedom and fun.
This year one of Liebeck’s treats is Duelling Composers: Staves Drawn!
“We all know about epic rock music rivalries like The Rolling Stones and The Beatles,but did you know the classical music world also had such feuds,” Liebeck tells me on a whirlwind promotional trip to Brisbane.
He’s based in London, does his programming from afar but props himself in Townsville from mid-July in the lead up to the AFCM.
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“I thought the idea of duelling composers would be interesting and amusing. These composers were often competing with each other and they had differing views about what the purpose of music was. Brahms seems not to have liked many others. He certainly didn’t like Tchaikovsky or Liszt.”
Tchaikovsky didn’t think much of Brahms either. “It angers me that this conceited mediocrity is regarded as a genius,” the composer wrote in his diary back then.
Why didn’t he tell us what he really thought?
Brahms and Liszt had an ideological difference about style and Brahms reportedly slept through Liszt’s premiere of his epic Sonata (ouch!) and Liszt found Brahams music to be “hygienic but unexciting”.
As Liebeck explains, such things are not merely historical.
‘They waged a kind of musical cold war for 40 years …’
“A more contemporary rivalry is the one between Steve Reich and Philip Glass, both pioneers of minimalist music and classmates at the Julliard School of Music, New York,” Liebeck says. “They waged a kind of musical cold war for 40 years but it finally broke in 2012 when they met and apparently got along okay.”
AFCM explores these rivalries in a program that the composers themselves might only have partly enjoyed. It’s a titillating idea and an example of Liebeck’s clever programming for a festival that’s called Townsville home for 34 years.
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AFCM attracts musicians from all over the world to perform in the balmy North Queensland winter. Independent research in 2024 suggests the event generated a total spend in Queensland of $20 million, up from $9.32 million in 2023. The total attendance of 22,106 across all events had increased 16 per cent, when it came to interstate and overseas visitors. Those pesky southerners love North Queensland in winter!
Recent news that the event secured $525,000 funding over five years from The Ian Potter Foundation for the expansion of the AFCM’s Pathways Program has put a spring in the festival’s step, too.
Minister for the Arts John-Paul Langbroek says the State Government is right behind the event, which drives economic benefit through cultural tourism.
“Events like the AFCM are vital to securing our state’s reputation as a vibrant arts and cultural destination and maximizing legacy opportunities that come with the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.”
One of Liebeck’s focuses this year is featuring extraordinary female musicians from around the world, led by the famed UK soprano Carolyn Sampson making her Australian debut as a soloist. Emily Sun, the London-based Australian violin superstar, is also coming along with a retinue of other international and Australian artists.
Sampson says she can’t wait to visit.
“I’ve heard such a lot about this Australian festival,” Sampson says. “I’m most excited to meet and work with new people and hope this might be the start of good friendships and collaborations.
“Jack Liebeck’s idea that I could try Straus’s Four Last Songs with accordion, and Australian accordionist James Crabb, is super interesting and I can’t wait to see how it works.
“I’ve only ever performed once in Australia and that was in the late ’90s when I was a member of The Sixteen (choral ensemble) and we had a few concerts in Brisbane. This will be my first time in North Queensland and I’m bringing my children and my mum.”
Other artists coming from overseas include famed American violinist Adam Barnett-Hart, pianist Olga Zado from Ukraine and cellist Kyril Zlotnikov (Belarus/Israel), who is also making his AFCM debut.
The Australian contingent includes Emily Sun, James Crabb, saxophonist Henry Docker, Brisbane harpist Loni Fitzpatrick and many others. Andrew Ford, composer, broadcaster and musicologist, will be supplying some of the brain food this year, including a three-part lecture on the history of music.
And, of course, Liebeck, an internationally renowned violinist in his own right, will play too. Playing what?
“I’m playing bloody everything,” he says. “I’m playing in all sorts. I’m going to be the walking dead by the time it’s over.”